"You could add to the sum of the world's knowledge, and tell stories, and make a living doing it. Phew! Throw me into that briar patch!"

As a boy growing up in Wisconsin, Stephen Ambrose planned to follow in his father's footsteps as a small-town doctor; he entered the University of Wisconsin as a pre-med student, but his first day in American History class changed his life. He changed his major to history and never looked back. His first book sold fewer than a thousand copies, but it caught the eye of former President Dwight Eisenhower, who invited Ambrose to write an authorized biography.